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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Haffrung" data-source="post: 7895082" data-attributes="member: 6776259">Probably the thing most surprising to me about the D&D boom we're experiencing is that a game this complicated has found a mass audience. I'm also a long-time hobby boardgamer, and as that hobby boomed in the last decade, the great proportion of the growth has been in the lighter, casual segment. The kind of complex, longer games put out by Avalon Hill back in the day have almost vanished, and most popular hobby boardgames today can be learned in 15 minutes and take under 2 hours to play.So in the wider ecology of tabletop gaming, D&D 5E is a very complex game. You cannot verbally explain the game in 15 minutes, or even an hour. Players need to learn and memorise many pages of rules, including reams of specific and conditional rules. The rules themselves are not presented in a clear and easily-referenced way. The assumption seems to be that if you want to play D&D, you need to spend hours reading rules, put to memory 20-40 pages of detailed mechanics,, and learn how to apply them in a highly situational, fluid game environment.Of course many players - especially the newer cohort who aren't hardcore gamers - don't actually do all that. From my experience the last couple years with tables of mostly new players, they typically learn only a small fraction of the rules, and need to be walked through many of their actions and choices by the DM or another player. And for many, this never changes. They never do take the books home and read them. They're clearly only interested in engaging with the mechanics in a very basic form - roll to hit and roll damage - and consider the rest of it a perplexing distraction from the imaginary story unfolding at the table.I'd go so far as to say if WotC studied the people playing D&D in 2020, what elements they engage with and their tolerance for complexity, and then went away and designed an RPG from the ground up specifically to cater to those preferences, they would come back with a system that didn't look much like D&D 5E (or any previous edition). It would be much simpler, with a dramatically greater emphasis on narrative and character background and less on combat and number-crunching. Because IMHO, a great many people who have started playing D&D in recent years enjoy it despite the system mechanics, not because of them.</blockquote>

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